Just recently we were mentioned in a comprehensive benchmark and comparison of several available gender inference services.

The team of Gender Gap in Science who conducted the survey assembled a list with more than 7,000 people and their
gender and used this list as a basis for the comparison. They combined different error
metrics and constraints to define benchmarks for realistic situations (e.g.minimize
the proportion of all inaccuracies while keeping the mix-ups between female and male
assignments under the threshold of 5. In all benchmarks, and on almost all sources comprising the test data set,
Gender API shows the best results.

"In all our benchmarks, and on almost all sources comprising our test data set, Gender API shows the best results."

This outcome makes us very proud and confirms that conducting not just a simple database
lookup, but working with data in detail is the best service we can offer to our customers.

Good news, during the last couple of months,
our team has worked very hard on a full rewrite of our name lookup engine.

We improved so many great details that we couldn't just put them into one single announcement anymore.

So here is our first improvement, we would like to share with you: Reduced split call failure rate.

Our split API is one of our customers' most used features. However, we understand that it can be very tricky to split a
full name into its parts.

With the new API version, we are able to reduce the failure rate of all split calls by about
40%. With the old API version, about 90% of the calls returned the correct result. The new version improves
this performance to 94% as internal tests show.

To achieve this improvement, we completely refactored our codebase and developed specific
micro-services, which can also be more easily improved in the future.

The advancement also includes improved support for countries where Gender-API.com is already heavily in use,
for example Germany or the Netherlands.
Names with an affix like "Thomas van der Weijden" are now properly resolved into their consisting parts.

During the last few months, we revised and completely redesigned the backend of our email interface in 3 steps.
With the new interface it is now possible to break up email addresses that do not have a clearly distinguishable separator between the first and last name.
Before the update, names had to be separated by a dot or hyphen for the email address to be properly broken up. With the new interface, email
addresses such as kathleenevans44@gmail.com can now be broken up without any problems. How do we do this: We implemented a multi-stage process using machine
learning to check the frequency of any possible first and last name combination to provide the best possible result for each case. Internal tests and analysed
have shown that result quality improved by more than 30%.

After a year of testing, our split API left its beta state. The API was constantly improved since we first launched it with some of our biggest customers a year ago.
The API can split full names (first and last name) into its parts.
If you have a combined field for first and last name on your page, use this API to extract the parts:

We added support for Excel files. Upload any CSV or Excel file containing a first name column to your account. For a better
determination result, simply add a country column to your dataset. It is not necessary to name the columns accordingly in advance. Our wizzard guides you through the process and lets
you choose which column contains which token, first name or country included.

In September we started to collect information on your data usage and put them into a statistic to give you a detailed view on your monthly
usage. To view your usage statistic just sign in to your account. You'll get a detailed view on how many of your requests you used, and
how many of them were left at the end of the month.

It is now possible to download invoices directly in your account. Until now, invoices were sent to you by email.
Since many customers lost this email or deleted it accidentally, we decided to add a
new navigation point within your account called "Invoices". Here you will find all your newly created invoices.

It’s only a matter of time until IPv6 replaces IPv4 as the standard on the Internet.
Gender-API.com supports from this time on native IPv6 access to our services.
If your ISP supports the new protocol you will automatically access our site through IPv6.

With our new CSV bulk upload feature you can now easily upload up to
1 Million datasets in one single file.
While it is not necessary to specifically name the columns, our assistant guides you through the
process by letting you choose which column contains which token, first name or country included.
The feature is located within your account. Processed records will be charged like requests so that you can upload
a CSV file with up to 1,000 entries for free every month.
This sample CSV file:

We are continuously adding more and more datasets to our database. Today, we support more than
140 countries with over 350,000 unique names. All in all, our database contains 5,347,230 datasets. With 68,077 names the United States
is our best supported country in the world.

Since the market was lacking an easy way to deduce the gender from a first name for commercial use,
we started our project gender-api.com with a dataset of about 140,000 names in 68 different countries to meet these needs.
Our goal is to support the maximum level of variant forms of spelling and to take into account the peculiarities of different countries
all over the globe.